


how far to live on

by eudaimon



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:57:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kirk listens because it's his bridge, his ship, and because he's lonely and, in his dreams, he's still falling through space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how far to live on

At night, he dreams of hurtling through space. He dreams the taste of ozone, the scream of the wind that wasn’t louder than the shuddering thumping thudding of his own beating heart as he fell like a stone. In the dreams, sometimes he catches Sulu and sometimes he doesn’t but, mostly, he’s falling. He’s just falling forever and Vulcan’s rushing up to meet him.

He snaps awake in the dark and lies there breathing hard. No ‘night’ on the ship, not exactly, just programmed dark…hours when he’s sleeping instead of awake. He knows that Chekov runs laps when most of the ship is sleeping. He knows this because Sulu knows this, and they talk about it on the bridge sometimes: lap counts and times and _would Chekov mind picking his sweaty fucking things up off the floor, please?_ Kirk listens because it’s his bridge, his ship, and because he’s lonely and, in his dreams, he’s still falling through space.

And he hates that he feels like that. They did it, they’re back…Chekov did his fucking whiz-kid thing and plucked them out of space still falling and then they kicked Romulan ass and now it’s history, stuff of legend and banner-headline, so…

So why can’t he stop thinking about it? Why, when he swings his leg to the side and takes a swig of water, can he still taste Vulcan’s red dust bleeding into the air?

He gets out of bed, naked as the day he was born (frankly, he’s sick of hearing about the goddamn day he was born), still bruised from everything that’s happened, bruised by Romulans and by Spock and by slamming into Sulu’s body with force in mid-air. He rubs his fingers against his ribs as he walks to the window. The shade is up and it’s full rim to rim with stars. The window is a luxury. It’s good to be the Captain. He flexes his shoulders, a tightness in the muscles that a week’s leave on the beach in Rio didn’t put an end to. Maybe he ought to have gone home, instead, but with his Mom out in the atmosphere, there didn’t seem to be any point. He stands there for a moment, forehead leaned against the glass. Every atom of the atmosphere is controlled so the window is barely cool to the touch, but Kirk knows that, on the other side of the window, the cold goes on forever.

In the end, he puts on pants and a t-shirt and he finds himself down on the shuttle deck. The whole deck seems to be humming, and it’s kind of nice, like hearing that the ship is working, deep down inside. He walks slowly, trailing his fingers against one of the shuttles and somewhere he can hear the rhythmic pounding of sneakers on the deck. 

Kirk was there the day that Chekov won the Starfleet marathon. He hadn’t really been paying attention, drinking a beer and flirting with Galia (oh, Jesus, _Galia_ , and he wonders dimly when all of those losses are going to stop coming back, eighty percent of their graduating class, _Jesus Christ_ ) and dimly he’d registered the skinny Russian kid keeping pace with the guy from Kenya, the favourite, who was all long limbs and ragged fluid grace. It had rained and they had been throwing up mud and it had splashed against Chekov’s pale face and it had taken Kirk a while to realise that that they were both running in their bare feet in the dirt.

He sits down with his back to the wall and closes his eyes and listens to his ship breathing and his navigator running and, in time, he opens his eyes and Chekov’s standing there, bent slightly over his knees and trying to catch his breath.

“Captain,” he says and Kirk smiles. He tips Chekov a lazy salute and looks up from the loose thread in the knee of his pants.

“Why aren’t you sleeping, Chekov? Don’t you have Alpha shift on the bridge?”

Chekov nods.

“As do you, Captain, I think.”  
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

Chekov lowers himself down to sit beside him and swigs water from a bottle. Kirk can smell him, not a dirty smell, but sweaty and he imagines Sulu still awake when Chekov comes back to whichever cabin they’re sleeping in, Sulu stripping off Chekov’s shirt and pushing him into a shower cubicle just narrow enough for two. And he imagines them fucking, and it being Sulu who brings up that scent on Chekov’s skin. Sometimes, he thinks about that and then he pretends that he doesn’t. He shakes his head to clear the thought. 

What they do after Chekov’s done running is none of his business. He just wishes that it was.

“How did you do it?” he asks, finally. “Nobody else could have done it, but you did.”

Chekov shakes his head and looks down at his hands.

“Mr Scott could have done it.”  
“Bullshit.”

He lets that hang between them.

“It was what it was, Captain,” he says, finally. “And I did what I did. And I couldn’t do it again, so don’t fall again. Please.”

He tries to smile. It almost works.  
Kirk tries to smile, too.

“You sure about that?”

Chekov nods.

“In my dreams, I never catch you,” he admits, and that explains a lot. That explains why the kid’s running in the middle of the night while, somewhere, Sulu’s sleeping. “In my dreams, I lose you or him or both of you.”

He sighs and rubs at his mouth with his fingers and Kirk hesitates for a moment, which is an unfamiliar feeling for him. He hesitates and then he drops his arm around Chekov’s shoulders and squeezes him in against his side. The skinny spare span of him in no way recalls Sulu. The bruises on Kirk’s side don’t match against Chekov’s ribs. His body is a map back to a place that he barely remembers being in the first place, a place which sounds like rushing wind and tastes of ozone and red-dust.

Chekov goes stiff for a moment, but then his right shoulder relaxes and the rest of him follows suit.

“You didn’t lose either of us, Chekov,” he says, quietly. “You did good.” 

In the back of his head, Kirk knows that he’s the only one who lost here, and it’s something that he never even had in the first place.

*

Chekov sits down in the chair in the corner to unlace his running shoes and Sulu rolls towards him and doesn’t wake. Who knows what Sulu dreams about? Chekov wasn’t lying to the Captain when he said that he dreams about losing them. He has nightmares about watching their life-signs snap into flat-lines. 

He likes to believe that he could save them again, if it came to it. He likes to believe that because he has a bad feeling about Kirk and Sulu and the trouble that they can get themselves into, given the infinite nature of the universe, and time.

He strips off all of his clothes and stands for a moment under the cool air from the vent. When it happens, he isn’t even sure that he hears it. It sounds like Sulu breathes a name as he rolls onto his stomach and buries his face in the crook of his arm. Slowly, Chekov gets onto the bed with him, pulls the sheet aside so that he can press himself against Sulu’s bare back. He leans his forehead against Sulu’s shoulder, presses one hand against his heart. It’s beating faster that it should be and, not for the first time, Chekov wonders what he’s dreaming.

He rubs his nose between Sulu’s shoulder blades so he feels it when Sulu shudders and, this time, Chekov hears exactly what he mumbles in his sleep. 

Chekov’s Momma used to tell him stories about love at first sight, and Chekov doesn’t know if he believes them, exactly, but he knows that something in him was fundamentally changed when he saw Hikaru Sulu coming home.

And the Captain. He loves James Kirk like he loves the Enterprise, and all of those feelings are complicated and, for them, he has no names.

*

There’s glitter on Chekov’s face and he can’t figure out where it’s come from. He doesn’t stare, or he does, but he’s subtle about it. He shuts up and drinks his beer and watches them dancing. There’s something strange about civilian clothes. T-shirt and jeans are lighter than his uniform and it leaves him off balance.

He leans back against the wall and drags in a shuddering breath and out on the floor Chekov and Sulu are swaying, slow dancing and Kirk feels that stab of loneliness again. It’s not jealousy, it couldn’t be, but it’s not exactly pleasant, standing there alone and watching the light catch on Chekov’s cheekbone as Sulu grazes his lips there and Kirk can’t see it but he imagines glitter sticking to his lips like stars.

So, yeah, it’s a little bit like being jealous. Just a little.

He ends up slumped in a booth with one foot up on the bench and his beer on his chest and his eyes closed and if he can just drink enough he knows that he’ll sleep through the night and maybe he won’t wake up sure that he’s just been shouting the name of a planet that he couldn’t save. _I dare you to do better_ , Pike said, but Kirk’s starting to think than Christopher Pike might be good, but he’s got no idea how shitty being the hero can sometimes be.

“Captain…”

He opens his eyes and they’re standing there, Sulu hovering behind Chekov like a nervous kid, and they’re holding hands, and carrying three fresh beers between them. There’s glitter clinging to both bottom lips, like they’ve been kissing on the dance-floor, kissing in the civvies in the almost dark.

He drains his beer and sets the bottle down on the table.

“Hey, guys.”  
“We can sit?”

Kirk sighs and takes his feet down, gesturing to the other side of the booth.

“Make yourselves comfortable.”

He can’t even begin to imagine what’s going on here, what Chekov thinks he’s doing as he sets a beer down in front of each of them or anything. Sulu wipes at his lip with his thumb and Kirk wishes he’d stop because the glitter isn’t going anywhere and it’s just making him uncomfortable.

So much about this is making him uncomfortable, and it’s not at all a feeling that he’s used to. What he wants to know is this: how are they supposed to talk to each other, now? How are they supposed to hear a fucking word over the memory of the rushing wind? 

For a long couple of minutes, nobody speaks…Chekov stares at the table and Sulu picks at his beer bottle and Kirk watches them both catching the light and he feels like he’s intruding, sitting there, just like he felt like he was intruding sitting there the other night when Chekov was running. He feels like a stranger among men who ought to be, if not his friends…They ought to be _something_. They owe each other more than uneasy silence.

“Well, this is comfortable,” says Sulu, picking at the label on his beer-bottle. He winces, and Kirk imagines that Chekov dug his fingers into his thigh.

“I’ll drink to that,” says Kirk, raising his bottle, and Sulu smiles, and it isn’t the first time that Kirk’s saved him.

“This is it,” says Chekov, settling down in the booth, slender and pretty in black, but Kirk remembers him running, and he remembers the look on his face when he plucked them out of space. He remembers thinking, _Jesus, this kid could do anything_. He remembers being so grateful.

“What’s it?” he asks.

“This is it, now, forever,” says Chekov. “This is us. We dream about each other, Captain. This is how is has to be.”

And it isn’t fucking (which Kirk isn’t sure that he wants anyway), and it isn’t dancing, and it certainly isn’t _love_ , but it isn’t falling either, and, somewhere in the middle of it all, in the red-dust-ozone tasting star-spangled tumble of it all, the three of them sitting in a booth talking is enough. It’s actually enough.


End file.
